From: Ross A. Finlayson (extropy@apexinternetsoftware.com)
Date: Sat Oct 19 2002 - 04:01:48 MDT
On Friday, October 18, 2002, at 10:22 PM, Gina Miller wrote:
> The Nanogirl News
> October 18, 2002
>
> House Gets Own Nanotech Legislation to Consider. One month after the
> Senate
> Commerce Committee passed legislation promoting nanotechnology funding
> and
> development, Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., introduced the Nanoscience and
> Nanotechnology Advisory Board Act on Thursday. The bill, H.R. 5669,
> would
> establish an independent advisory board comprised of leaders from
> industry
> and academia to advise the President and Congress on research investment
> strategy, policy, objectives and oversight related to the government's
> National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI). (DC Internet 10/18/02)
> http://dc.internet.com/news/article.php/1484461
>
Research and development spending are the precursors of growth,
according to my 1993 paper. That's about economic growth.
> Nano-Machines Get Some Fresh Air. For nanometer-sized machines, air is
> so
> thick it saps their energy. That means most contraptions must be
> confined to
> vacuum chambers. But now physicists report that a little laser light can
> help nanomachines operate in open air. The advance could open the way
> for
> ultrasensitive biodetectors. (inSight 10/2/02)
> http://www.academicpress.com/inscight/10012002/graphb.htm
>
Coherent light may drive a small wave of particles out of "gas vacuum."
They tickle them on out.
> Study reveals nanoscale structure in amorphous material. The common view
> that amorphous materials are simply jumbled collections of atoms may
> give
> way to a more ordered theory of the materials' formation, according to
> experiments conducted at the University of North Carolina. Studies of
> an
> amorphous form of zinc chloride have revealed an unexpected order at
> nanoscale distances that may lead to new engineered materials in a wide
> number of industries, said project head James Martin. "What I'm calling
> 'amorphous-materials engineering' will allow us to design
> nanostructures and
> then go in there and make them, [just as] we do with crystalline
> engineering
> today," (EETimes 10/18/02)
> http://www.eet.com/at/news/OEG20021017S0040
>
So what.
> MIT model predicts birthplace of defect in a material. Applications
> include
> nanotechnology, more. Defects such as cracks in a material are
> responsible
> for everything from malfunctioning microchips to earthquakes. Now MIT
> engineers have developed a model to predict a defect's birthplace, its
> initial features and how it begins to advance through the material.
> The model could be especially useful in nanotechnology. "As devices get
> smaller and smaller, understanding the phenomena of defect nucleation
> and
> growth becomes more and more important," said Subra Suresh, head of the
> Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). A seemingly
> minuscule dislocation--a local disorder in the arrangement of atoms
> inside a
> material--or a crack can drastically compromise the performance of a
> device.
> (Eurekalert 10/1/02)
> http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-10/miot-mmp100102.php
>
So what.
> (Profile) Even though Lucent Technologies' recent bad news could spell
> trouble for its famous R&D facility, Bell Labs' Nanotechnology Research
> Director John A. Rogers is hopeful his people and projects will escape
> the
> budget axe. On Friday, the company announced an additional 10,000
> company-wide job cuts, reduced earnings expectations and $4 billion of
> additional charges against its third quarter revenues and equity. Not
> good
> news, certainly, and coming on the heels of Bell Labs' recent
> announcement
> it fired ethically-challenged researcher Hendrik Schön for falsifying
> data
> and results, the timing could have been better. (Nanotech Planet
> 10/15/02)
> http://www.nanoelectronicsplanet.com/nanochannels/profiles/article/0,4028,
> 10
> 500_1481591,00.html
>
Ridiculous, to true scientists.
> Chemists Synthesize Key Component in Drive Toward Molecular Electronic
> Devices. University of Chicago chemists have successfully synthesized an
> electronic component the size of a single molecule that could prove
> crucial
> in the continuing push to miniaturize electronic devices. The component,
> called a molecular diode, restricts current flow to one direction
> between
> electronic devices. In the semiconductor industry these components,
> called
> p-n junctions, form half of a transistor. Man-Kit Ng, a 2002 Ph.D. in
> Chemistry, and Luping Yu, Professor in Chemistry, describe their diode
> in
> the Oct. 2 issue of the journal Angewandte Chemie and online Sept. 12
> in the
> Journal of the American Chemical Society. (aScribe 10/1/02)
> http://www.ascribe.org/cgi-
> bin/spew4th.pl?ascribeid=20021001.133336&time=21%
> 2004%20PDT&year=2002&public=1
>
So what.
> Advances in materials science excite professor. Arthur J. Freeman, an
> oft-quoted expert in quantum modeling, sees the most exciting days
> ahead in
> the field to which he has dedicated more than 40 years of work. The
> reason?
> An opportune convergence of affordable supercomputing, breakthroughs in
> nanotechnology, and a new field of study called computational materials
> science. (The Sun Times 10/16/02)
> http://www.suntimes.com/output/zinescene/cst-fin-ecol16.html
>
Ditto.
> Bugs trained to build circuit. Bacteria lay bricks on nano scale
> building
> site. Bacteria have found a new vocation - as nanoscale construction
> workers. Such bugs might form microbial machines that could repair
> wounds or
> build microscopic electrical circuits. Tetsuo Kondo of the Forestry and
> Forest Products Research Institute in Ibaraki, and his colleagues,
> used a
> grooved film to train the bacterium Acetobacter xylinum to exude neat
> ribbons of a biological building material - cellulose1. The bug laid
> down
> strips at a rate of 4,000ths of a millimetre per minute. (Nature Science
> Update 10/8/02)
> http://www.nature.com/nsu/021007/021007-1.html
>
About time.
> Nanoscale electronics. Bustling research is producing sophisticated
> laboratory demonstrations, but commercialization of nanometer-sized
> devices
> remains a ways off. At first there were only a few of them, but
> recently,
> their numbers have multiplied wildly. Newspaper headlines, magazine
> articles, journal papers, even television commercials now are loaded
> with
> those big "nano" words: nanometer, nanoscale, nanosecond, and
> nanotechnology, to name a few. And it seems that every week some
> organization is announcing yet another "nanoconference." -2 pages-(C&E
> cover
> story 9/30/02)
> http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/8039/8039nanoelectronics.html
>
Burp.
> IBM grows nanotube patterns on silicon wafers. IBM Corp. has grown
> catalyst-free nanotube networks on silicon carbide substrates, the
> company
> said last week. With atomic-force microscopy verifying the results,
> researchers at the T.J. Watson Research Center set up grids of
> nanotubes (in
> rows and columns), bringing the promise of nanotube transistors arrayed
> across silicon chips one step closer to reality, IBM said. (EETimes
> 9/30/02)
> http://www.eet.com/at/news/OEG20020930S0013
>
Good. About time.
> Altair Nanotechnologies Receives Order From F.W. Gartner Thermal
> Spraying
> Co.; Shipment of Nano-Structured Thermal Spray Product Produces $60,000
> in
> Revenues. Altair Nanotechnologies (Nasdaq:ALTI) today announced that it
> has
> received another order from Houston-based F.W. Gartner Thermal Spraying
> Co.
> to provide more than 1,000 pounds of one of its patented,
> nano-structured
> titanium dioxide-based thermal spray products. (Stockhouse 10/17/02)
> http://www.stockhouse.com/news/news.asp?tick=ALTI&newsid=1358937
>
Titanium Dioxide! Yay. Titanium burns at about 1800 C, or 2700 C.
> Nanocylinders Open Way To Polymer Electronics. International team of
> scientists succeeds in synthesizing new supramolecular materials for
> optoelectronics from organic crystals and polymers. A team of German and
> American scientists have succeeded in combining conventional organic
> molecules and conductive polymers to form highly symmetric, structured
> materials with new electronic properties. After the attachment of
> specific
> functional groups, the disc-like or ring-shaped organic molecules
> organize
> into highly symmetric cylinders, three nanometers in thickness and
> 50-100
> nanometers in length, just like a roll of coins. (MaxPlanck
> Society-Press
> Release- 10/2/02)
> http://www.mpg.de/news02/news0223.htm
>
Polymers.
> Intel Tuesday unveiled its strategy to cram some of its chips with 1
> billion
> transistors by 2007. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip making giant
> said
> it is using a combination of nanotechnology (define) and design changes
> to
> its semiconductors to help extend Moore's Law (define) by a few more
> years.
> The plan is to use its upcoming mobile Banias processors Itanium, Xeon
> and,
> along with its Hyper-Threading technology as the testing ground for its
> initiative. "We are looking at a lot of different ideas about what
> specific
> apps would be the drivers for the 1 billion transistor chips," Intel
> fellow
> John Crawford said at the Microprocessor Forum 2002 here. "I'm not
> speculating, but I think that some of the advances will help extend
> memory
> chip designs further and further." (Siliconvalley 10/16/02)
> http://siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article.php/1482341
>
Oh, Moore's law.
> The Amazing Vanishing Transistor Act. Radical changes are in the offing
> for
> transistors as their dimensions shrink to a few tens of nanometers. A
> decade
> from now you won't recognize a transistor even if it's walking toward
> you up
> the street, assuming you could see it, of course. The gate length-the
> marker
> for gauging how small that CMOS transistor is-will be roughly one-fifth
> the
> size of the smallest in production today, only 10 nm instead of today's
> 50
> nm. To get to that size and ensure that the transistor still operates
> will
> require many changes:....(IEEE Spectrum Online 10/18/02)
> http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/oct02/nano.html
>
Boop.
> Diffraction gradient lithography aids nanofluidics. Small fluidic
> structures
> are important tools in the emerging field of bionanotechnology, but it
> can
> be difficult to stretch out long molecules such as DNA so that they can
> enter the nano-sized channels. Now, researchers from Princeton
> University,
> US, have developed a relatively cheap technique for making devices that
> gradually uncoil the molecules before guiding them into the channels.
> (nanotechweb.org 10/11/02)
> http://nanotechweb.org/articles/news/1/10/9/1
>
Microcompufluidics: microcompufluidics.
> It would send and receive faxes and video and have the processing power
> of a
> personal computer. The cell phone of the future would be on the market
> today
> but for one hitch: the battery...So Martin and his team are making
> progress
> on a new approach: Batteries inspired by the emerging field of
> nanotechnology. The research could both improve the small batteries
> used in
> portable electronics and lead to truly miniscule power packs for so
> called
> "microelectromechanical" machines, or MEMS, devices. In the first year
> of a
> five-year collaborative effort with three other institutions funded by
> a $5
> million grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the research is
> showing progress toward its goal of creating a three-dimensional,
> millimeter-sized battery...(Eurekalert 10/10/02)
> http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-10/uof-ab101002.php
>
Oh, Moore's law.
> Brain on a chip. Researchers in California have found a way to keep
> slices
> of living brain alive for weeks, which could soon become a powerful
> tool for
> testing new drugs. The mini-brain consists of a glass chip containing
> tens
> of thousands of interconnected living brain cells, taken from rats or
> mice.
> (Eurekalert 10/16/02)
> http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-10/ns-boa101602.php
>
Neurons on chip: big f'in whoop.
> Phlesch Bubble awarded the IMM Computational Nanotechnology Prize.
> Phlesch
> Bubble has been awarded the IMM Computational Nanotechnology Prize
> (Simulation category) for their animation of a working respirocyte (a
> hypothetical artificial red blood cell). David Forrest, President of the
> Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, commented about the animation:
> "The
> judges were very impressed with the quality of (the) work, the level of
> detail, and the fidelity to the physics of fluid motion in the
> bloodstream
> and the biological environment of the respirocyte. The operation of the
> respirocyte was communicated with clarity, attention to detail,
> scientific
> accuracy, and high visual impact." (Nanotech-now.com 10/17/02)
> http://nanotech-now.com/phleschbubble-release-10172002.htm
>
Good luck in a spirocyte!
> Polymers self-assemble to form 2.5-nm diode. diode measuring just 2.5
> nanometers was recently demonstrated by University of Chicago professor
> Luping Yu, who called it the world's smallest. The operation of the
> polymer-based p-n junction diode, synthesized using organic chemistry by
> postdoctoral assistant Man-Kit Ng, was verified with a scanning
> tunneling
> microscope. (EETimes 10/16/02)
> http://www.eet.com/at/news/OEG20021015S0040
>
> 'Nanotechnology' opens windows into medicine. Microscopic capsules at
> least
> a million times smaller than the average pill may soon advance medicine
> on
> Earth and open new frontiers for long-term space habitation. These
> miniature
> wonders known as "nanoparticles" would be injected into the bloodstream
> of
> human beings and they would travel on a permanent high alert mode
> looking
> for damaged cells as they cruised through the body.
> (Galveston County Daily News 10/16/02)
> http://galvestondailynews.com/report.lasso?wcd=5161
>
About time.
> DOE picks head for chemical division. Research in catalysis,
> nanoscience,
> bioscience, and computational chemistry targeted for growth. Stevens
> singled
> out four areas in the division where he would like to see growth in the
> near
> and long term: research in catalysis, theory and modeling in nanoscale
> science, bioscience research, and computational chemistry
> (C&E 10/1/02) http://pubs.acs.org/cen/today/oct1.html
>
Spending on research is the primary driver of growth. (Finlayson, 1993)
> Microsoft Windows is now compatible with one of the best-selling
> computer
> modeling (CM) suites, which are among the most important nanotechnology
> R&D
> lab tools. But some nanotech experts are less than impressed. CM
> software is
> used to create models of structures down to the molecular level and
> produce
> simulations, graphics and analyses. One of the leading CM suites,
> Materials
> Studio (MS) from Accelrys Inc., added the ability to run under Windows
> recently. (Small Times 10/15/02)
> http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?document_id=4822
>
Duh.
> The Birmingham Post: Nano-technology is next big thing. BA battle is
> developing over the UK's planned nano-technology centre. The West
> Midlands,
> which has considerable expertise in the science, is bidding strongly to
> bring it to the region. But Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia
> Hewitt has
> told The Birmingham Post that no decision has yet been taken on the
> multimillion pound project. (Hoover's online 10/11/02)
> http://hoovnews.hoovers.com/fp.asp?layout=displaynews&doc_id=NR20021011670
> 4
> _4a70000bc7f10aa5
>
> P.S. I had a great time chatting with some of you at the Foresight
> Conference!
>
> Gina "Nanogirl" Miller
> Nanotechnology Industries
> http://www.nanoindustries.com
> Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com
> Foresight Senior Associate http://www.foresight.org
> Extropy member http://www.extropy.org
> "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future."
>
Nanotechnology offers great advantages. Drexler in 89 predicted nano as
a super-tech. It may well be. Nano may offer us each longevity and
protection from nano-bugs. It's cheaper to just make a nano-bug.
Ross
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